Jake Lundberg

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
In 1934, Edwin Embree made an informal list of “the dozen greatest universities in America.” As he related in The Atlantic the following year, “A storm at once broke over my temerarious head.” An unnamed politician responded with curses and threats over the exclusion of his state’s university on the list.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
Early in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. announced in The Atlantic that the necessities of life had been reduced to two things: bread and the newspaper. Trying to keep up with what Holmes called the “excitements of the time,” civilians lived their days newspaper to newspaper, hanging on the latest reports. Reading anything else felt beside the point.